Lord Gould of Brookwood

Lord Gould of Brookwood, the communications guru Philip Gould, who died on
November 6 aged 61, was credited with rebranding New Labour as a party of
Middle England and helping Tony Blair to three consecutive election
victories.

Photo: RICHARD WATT

11:49AM GMT 07 Nov 2011

Gould’s expertise — and the key to his influence — was his replacement of crude opinion polling with American-style political “focus” groups, a collection of up to 20 “ordinary voters” who would meet to discuss issues during two-hour sessions. By quizzing them about core issues such as crime, the National Health Service, education and the economy, Gould claimed to be able to divine public feeling and steer political strategy.

Gould’s exploitation of focus groups provided, as Blair himself put it, “an insight which rose above the mundane expression of, 'They like this’, or 'They hate this’.” Blair credited Gould with giving clarity to his conference speeches and having an uncanny feel for the public mood.

The central insight derived from these sessions was simple. Labour was seen as the profligate party whose concern for the poor was always let down by its economic incompetence, its habit of fighting old battles and its obsession with issues that had no resonance with ordinary voters. Potential supporters associated Labour with run-down council houses, strikes, Militant and cloth caps; they associated the Conservatives with aspirational private swimming pools, large cars and glasses of champagne.

The only solution, Gould argued, was for the party to turn its back on the past, “concede and move on”. There was no point fighting ideological battles that had already been lost on, say, unilateral nuclear disarmament or nationalisation.

His targets were not only the old-style socialists, but also the Hampstead liberal wing of the party: “Whenever I hear people being criticised for their blinkered or reactionary view on crime,” he wrote, "I always ask: have you known the dreadful, repetitive tedium of manual work ... lived in cramped houses in communities where walking the streets late at night is not a safe option, known the cancerous insecurity of work as clerks or office administrators, not poor, but never safe, always worrying about the cost of providing for your family?”

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Gould helped to devise the red rose emblem that signalled the end of “Old Labour” and set up the “rapid rebuttal” unit used by party spin doctors under Tony Blair. Along with Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, he was credited with being one of the chief architects of New Labour. He gave the party the language to make Tory voters feel comfortable about switching sides.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest tribute to Gould’s talents came from William Hague who, when leader of the Conservative Party in 1998, sent The Unfinished Revolution, Gould’s book about Labour’s resurrection, to every member of the Shadow Cabinet, inscribed with the words “know thine enemy”. For David Cameron, the lessons Gould taught were more profound. The Tory modernisers surrounding the new young leader were said to have copied what they dubbed the “Blair playbook” for opposition, taking to heart his account of the scale of the change that a party must be willing to contemplate in order to win power.

Gould was not popular with Labour traditionalists, who often blamed him for the Party’s obsession with spin over substance under Tony Blair (John Prescott expressed his open contempt with the words: “All that glitters isn’t Gould”). Even his allies found him trying on occasions: Alastair Campbell’s diaries described Gould as “manic in the extreme” and depicted him forever popping up with angst-ridden memoranda which often seemed to leak to the press.

A memo by Gould caused Tory glee in 1995 when it was leaked just before the TUC conference. Intended for the eyes only of Blair and a few others, it declared that Labour was not yet ready for government, and what the party needed was “a unitary command structure leading directly to the party leader”, resulting in charges of control-freakery.

In 2000 a memo came to light in which Gould described New Labour as an “object of ridicule” and the New Labour “brand” as being contaminated. Another memo, written just before Blair was slow-handclapped at the WI annual conference in 2000, warned that (according to focus groups) Blair “was all spin and presentation, had not delivered and (was) out of touch”.

In The Unfinished Revolution Gould admitted that he had leaked some memos himself, leading some critics to suggest that his purpose was egotistical — to demonstrate his influence over the Prime Minister. If so, they backfired, for they seldom offered anything in the way of practical suggestions. “The problem with Philip’s memos is they never come up with a solution,” one unnamed New Labour colleague was quoted as saying. “New Labour’s much vaunted Third Way [is] a great idea but exactly what does it mean and, more to the point, how is it put into practice?”

It seems unlikely that Gould was behind the leak of a five-page memo entitled “Reconnecting with the public — a new relationship with the media”, sent to Blair in April 2006 at a particularly difficult moment in his premiership. The memo contained advice on how to handle Gordon Brown and the rivalry between Cherie Blair and her husband’s aide Anji Hunter.

But it was Gould’s advice on how the Prime Minister should stage his exit from Downing Street with his reputation intact that caused the greatest amusement, prompting some suggestions that the memo was a wicked parody of Blairite spin. Proposals such as appearances on Blue Peter and Songs of Praise and a farewell tour featuring celebrity endorsements and taking in “iconic locations” to leave “the crowds wanting more”, were greeted with general derision.

The son of a schoolmaster, Philip Gould was born in Beddington, south London, on March 30 1950. Both his parents were left of centre and his maternal grandmother was a communist artist who had emigrated from Holland.

Gould was a dyslexic who failed his 11-plus and got only one O-level at his secondary modern school. He left at 16 to work in a building society, but returned to do A-levels at East London College, based in Toynbee Hall. He subsequently won a place at the University of Sussex to study Politics, graduating in 1974. He then went to the London School of Economics to study for a Master’s in the History of Political Thought. There he was taught by the great conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott, whose scepticism would feed into Gould’s pessimism about progressive politics. “Hegel and Oakeshott are a good mix,” he wrote, “one seeing life as the unfolding of great ideas, the other as a struggle to get by in a world without meaning.”

After a spell at the London Business School, Gould worked in advertising, then founded his own public affairs consultancy, Philip Gould Associates. His life changed in the mid-1980s when he met Peter Mandelson at a dinner party and convinced him of the need to mobilise the talents of Labour supporters in advertising and marketing.

Together with several others, Gould founded the Shadow Communications Agency, a panel of marketing and media specialists who gave their services free to the party. At the time MORI was Labour’s pollster, and Gould was brought in to provide “qualitative” rather than “quantitative” polling using focus groups. By 1987 MORI had been ditched as Gould and a colleague took control of the operation, supported by NOP. In fact, focus groups had been around since the 1950s, but Gould made them seem like an innovation.

It was Neil Kinnock who first had the benefit — if that is the right word — of Gould’s focus group apercus. Under his tutelage, Kinnock stopped smoking in public, began to wear smarter suits and ties, and — to the fury of Lancastrians and Labour stalwarts — adopted the red rose as the party’s new symbol, replacing the red flag.

The Gould recipe did not, however, have the required effect immediately. Labour was comprehensively defeated in 1987, and Gould was also blamed for dreaming up the disastrous searchlight-and-fanfare extravaganza in Sheffield a week before the 1992 general election, when the faithful greeted Kinnock like a rock star and floating voters fled. In 1990 Gould advised Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan Sandinista leader, who was also trounced electorally.

After Labour’s shock election defeat of 1992, there was an inevitable backlash against the “designer socialism” which Gould represented. Under John Smith’s brief leadership Gould was sidelined. Instead he went off to the United States to advise Bill Clinton in the presidential election of the same year. The Clinton “war room” and “instant rebuttal” unit would become a model for New Labour.

Blair’s succession to the leadership allowed Gould to return to the Labour fold. Before long the new leader’s speeches were full of talk about the “stakeholder society”, “inclusiveness”, “modernisation” and other heart-warming, if unspecific, New Labour themes. On Gould’s advice, Blair chose as the mantra of the 1997 campaign the words, “reassurance, reassurance, reassurance”.

After Labour’s landslide victory, Gould joined forces with Clinton’s pollster James Carville to form a transatlantic consultancy with offices in The Express headquarters of the Labour peer Lord Hollick, picking up some lucrative government contracts. Gould’s influence was said to have been crucial in the repositioning of the paper as a New Labour-supporting tabloid.

Gould continued to bombard Blair with the findings of his weekly focus groups, and during his years at Number 10 Gould and his high-powered wife, Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random Century, were seen as the ultimate power couple, personal friends of the Blairs and holiday companions of Alastair Campbell and his partner Fiona Millar. Although it caused embarrassment when plastered across the newspapers, the candour and scope of Gould’s advice was the reason why Blair placed such faith in him.

Gould’s combination of self-absorption, unflagging energy and dogged partisanship earned him the reputation as a dynamic if unrelaxing figure. In 2008, however, he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, which he later attributed, in part, to the intensity of his political life. He had chemotherapy and surgery, and in early 2010 went back to politics and work, flinging himself with characteristic gusto into the election campaign.

Relations between Gould and Blair’s successor Gordon Brown were never warm. (Brown’s former aide, Charlie Whelan, recalled that “Whenever we received anything from Gould it went straight into the bin”). But it was Gould who recommended the “five pledges” strategy with which Brown went into the 2010 election.

In 2011 Gould was told that his cancer had returned, and in July he published The Unfinished Life, a memoir about his illness. In September he announced that he had been given only three months to live.

The experience seems to have led him to reassess his own life and to be confirmed into the Church of England. “I was good for Labour — for politics,” he reflected in one of his last interviews. “But I was so obsessed and subsequently selfish. Ego-driven. Becoming hard drove out qualities such as compassion.” He had resolved, he explained, to die a better person. In the same spirit he also urged David and Ed Miliband to set aside their differences and build a public friendship.

Lord Gould, who was created a life peer in 2004, is survived by his wife, whom he met as a student at Sussex University and married in 1985, and by their two daughters.